Drive? Determination? Commitment?
I've been kind of "out of the game" for a couple of months for medical reasons. While I'm better, my health is not anywhere near where it was in December. In terms of physical fitness and stamina, I'm about where I was in June of 2011, when I felt confident I could lose weight, but wasn't yet ready to start.
Yesterday I started asking myself if it was really time to start losing weight again. I've had a few false starts "Oh, I can start losing weight again! ... Except I'm in too much pain/fatigue/drug haze to get off the couch and make healthy food. And healthy food hurts my insides... maybe I won't start yet."
Yesterday morning I stood on the scale. And the number was high. "OMG, I put on so much weight! I don't want to start over!" But hiding from data isn't going to get me anywhere. So I put yesterday's weight in my spreadsheet. And I put in all the weights from my scale's memory. And yes, my trend weight is up from 2 weeks ago. By like .8lb. And I'm on medication that makes me retain a pretty stable pound and a half to 2lb of water. I'm also pretty much the same as I was a month ago when I put health ahead of weight loss, and I'm missing 5 days of data for the last 10 days. So.. I can deal. Especially since this morning my scale weight was under my trend weight.
I have no drive. I have 2lb until I've lost half of the weight I ultimately want to lose, but I have no desire to push for a goal that's so close. I'm nearly out of obesity and into merely overweight, but I can't get excited about that either.
I have no determination. I don't even know what diet to follow, since calorie counting makes me crazy (or I'll refuse to count things that are too hard) and low-carb makes me feel bad. Paleo, even Paleo 2.0 sounds too incompatible with my current eating plan. I was doing a Med-style exchange diet, but most of what I was eating then - my body can't tolerate now. Exercise is another big unknown, because my stamina and energy levels have taken a beating. Certainly bicycle touring this summer is off the map.
Commitment? Maybe. At least to weighing myself every day again, and logging them periodically from the scale into my spreadsheet. I can't even bring myself to commit to opening the spreadsheet every day and dropping the number in.
On the other hand - what else am I going to do? Put my head in the sand and hope that my weight stays stable? Yeah, that's likely to be successful. Eat sugary/fatty junk because it's there and it tastes good? That's so good for healing my body.
I kept walking into the kitchen yesterday and pulling out the chocolate chip cookies. I wanted a cookie. But I never did it when I was hungry, so each time I put them away again. That's something else I can commit to. Not eating when I'm not hungry. Remembering to -stop- eating when I'm not hungry anymore, I'll work on. But I know that wanting to have dessert after dinner helps me remember, because otherwise I don't get hungry before bedtime.
I'm craving high-fat seafood (tuna, mussels, tuna, tuna, tuna... did I mention tuna?) and that's good for me, so I'll indulge it. And leafy green things, which I need to temper a little for my gut. And sweet potatoes.... so maybe for the time being, I'll just let the diet evolve on its own and try to watch portions and get my medication titrated properly with meals and figure out what foods are painful, and how I can cook them to be less painful.
So I don't have drive, or determination, or much of a plan.. but maybe I have commitment to some things. I have interest in not seeing the effort I put in last year go to waste, and maybe that will be enough.
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